Thailand's Leading Teleco Saves Millions with Red Hat

Submitted by Ty on April 3, 2007 - 3:00pm

Red Hat today announced that Advanced Info Service Public Company Limited (AIS), a mobile communications company in Thailand, has chosen Red Hat for its reliable, high-performing and cost-effective solutions.

AIS is Thailand's mobile communications market leader with approximately 20 million customers. The company ranks first in both the wireless communications business as well as remaining the leading mobile phone operator and network system provider and prides itself as a pioneer in technology innovation. AIS's responsibilities include acting as operator and service provider of Digital Global System Mobile mobile phone network, importing and distributing mobile phones, accessories and telecommunications equipment and providing call center, Internet and over-the-phone online data communication service.

Differing from the majority of telecommunications service postpaid markets, in Thailand the prepaid service market serves the vast majority of all mobile phone users. Prepaid service markets challenge companies like AIS with integrating next-generation technologies into legacy systems where implementation and usage tracking of services are lacking and expensive. AIS realized that upgrading systems for this market would cost tens of millions of dollars, and so developed its own Value-added Service Control Point (VSCP) system, providing the functionality needed to launch new mobile services to the postpaid market. AIS's VSCP system runs on a cluster of 200 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, which enable the system to provide reliable service control functions, service rating functions and service charging functions at low cost.

AIS is currently the biggest mobile phone operator in Thailand, so the availability preference for us is 99.999 percent uptime, said Arakin Rakchittapoke, Infrastructure Platform Development, ICTM, AIS. For every minute of downtime, there is potential for 60,000 complaints and we can't have that. We need a cost-effective solution that will be resilient and reliable as our demand in the telecommunications industry and the prepaid market continues to grow. For this, we turned to Red Hat solutions and have since reaped excellent benefits.

With Red Hat solutions, AIS was able to save millions of dollars for a telecommunications upgrade system. The company drastically reduced both hardware and software costs and has enjoyed great flexibility in tweaking its own solution and avoiding vendor lock-in. Also, since the full implementation of Red Hat solutions in June 2003, AIS has experienced 100 percent uptime without a single system outage.

We are thrilled that AIS turned to Red Hat solutions for its VSCP system, said Joanne Rohde, Executive Vice President of Vertical Marketing, Red Hat. The company has already seen significant benefits that will only continue to help it serve its telecommunications customers. As AIS continues to deploy additional services on top of this system, the company will continue to gain a return on investment as a result of Red Hat solutions.